First Steps in Online Teaching for Quilters (and other crafts)

You want to teach quilting online - awesome! You've taught in person and know how to structure your workshop. You're ready to move to teaching over Zoom or recording your own workshops. Great! Let's get you started. 

Establishing Who You Are

People need to be able to find out that you are a teacher, which means having an online presence. As a minimum you're going to need a list of what you can teach and some contact details. That could all be a single online page - but it needs to be somewhere people can find it. 

Choosing your Online Location

You want a main hub, such as a website or facebook page, where people can read about who you are and what you offer. Facebook has guidance on setting up a free page and there are several places where you can get a free website linked below. Your own website is preferred because many people do not use facebook so will never be able to access your information, and you never know when Facebook are going to stop showing your content. 

• Weebly - very easy to use
• Wix - slightly more sophisticated 

But wait - what is your contact information going to be? Obviously your name and approximate location, such as the US State or UK County you are in. NEVER put your full address online unless you have a brick and mortar store. Now your email address - are you going to use supernan@... or crazy4huskies@... or whatever your personal email address is? Or is it time to create a new email address for your online teaching... You can create a new email address with google or another provider very easily and for free. Choose something such as yourname-teacher@... or yourname-quilting@... That is usually enough contact information, but if you want to add a phone number think twice about using your personal or home phone. Instead you can go to Google Voice and get a free number that will forward calls to you, without you needing to put your own number online, which can lead to spam. 

Getting Social

If you are going to teach something, people need to be able to see that you can actually do it. You will want either a gallery on your website showing examples of your work, or a social media presence. Instagram and Facebook are the most common but you can also use others. Again, think about what you want your username to be and remember you can change your existing Instagram name. 

Learning to Teach Online - VERY IMPORTANT

Teaching online is not the same as teaching in-person. You cannot see what everyone is doing and they need to be able to very clearly see what you are doing. The best way to learn is to do an online course such as the Video Making Crash Course with the Academy for Virtual Teaching. (Lyric is a friend of mine and very kindly gave me a 10% off code for my readers - use my link and the code QUILTNLEARN to get the discount.) This is an excellent course that will save you days if not weeks of trying to work everything out for yourself. 

Equipment You Will Need

• Lighting is essential - simply sitting near a window will not give you strong enough light. This is the ring light I use which also holds your phone in an ideal place. 
• Additional cameras - your phone will give you one angle but you are probably going to want to show your face and where you are working, and switch between the two. Hence needing a second camera. Logitech is a well known name and has been making webcams for decades. This is the one I use. 
• Sound is another essential thing to get right. If you are moving between two cameras you need a single microphone recording your voice, and it needs to stay a consistent distance from your mouth. For me, a lapel mic was an obvious necessity and I bought this one at the start of the year. 

The Technical Tools

If you are only teaching live then set-up your zoom and away you go. If you are making pre-recorded content you'll need a few extra things. 

• The pandemic did the making community a huge favor - it taught us all how to use Zoom. That's the good news! The bad news is that the free Zoom plan only lets you teach for 40 minutes at a time. If you want to teach for longer than that you will need a paid plan.
• For pre-recorded videos you'll want to be able to neatly start and finish recordings, and crop out any long pauses or bits that go wrong. I am a mac user so I can use iMovie for free to help me edit recordings. Put aside 2-3 hours to watch "getting started" tutorials and then jump in. 
• If you want to have nice graphics at the start and end of your videos, or make marketing materials or polished looking handouts, then you need a graphics tool and Canva is the one everyone is using now. The free version is very easy to use and if you want more sophisticated templates and functions the paid version is not too expensive. 

Running an Event Online

There's that quote "Build It and They Will Come" which absolutely does NOT apply to anything on the internet. A more realistic quote would be "build it and then market it a lot for ages and then you might get some people turn up and after a while you'll build an audience but it will take a real effort to get there."

If your event is live you need to schedule it and then make tickets available online. Eventbrite is the most commonly used platform although it does charge the highest fees. Other options are Ticket Tailor and Humanitix. If you are paying for your website hosting there may be an option to sell tickets from there too. You can integrate most of these tools with Zoom and set it up so your attendees are sent a link to join at the right time. 

If you are selling access to a pre-recorded video you want to use a platform such as Teachable, Kajabi or similar. Yes, you could just send people a google drive or dropbox link to your video when they pay for it - but then they'll be able to send the same link to their friends, post it on facebook, download and copy your video and sell it as theirs and so on. Using a trusted platform means you can control who gets access. Kajabi is much more technical, with a lot more features than Teachable, and is therefore more expensive. There are also other options. 

Teaching at an Online Summit

If you are teaching at an online summit such as Quilt n Learn or the Tour de Fabric you only need to make a recording, not host that recording yourself. The Summit Leader will likely ask you to upload your recording somewhere and will then host it for you. 

It's All in the Marketing

You've decided what to teach, you've designed the curriculum, you've possibly created an online event for people to sign up for or you've created a pre-recorded video that people can buy...now's the time to tell everyone about it. First steps:

1. Find every email address you can and email them about your new course. Offer them a discount or incentive to sign up and encourage them to tell their friends. About 40% of your friends will open this email. About 10% of that 40% will click on a link to be supportive. Probably none of them will sign up. Don't be discouraged. 

2. Set up an email collection widget for your website at somewhere like Kit or MailChimp. You need to make sure you are collecting and using people's emails legally and these tools will help with that. 

3. Start building your email list and email them regularly with updates about your teaching etc. Liz Wilcox is an email marketing expert who I refer to pretty much weekly and I recommend her email marketing membership which I am a member of. She has advice about building your list and much more. 

4. Write an article for your Guild's newsletter and see if any other local guilds would like an article for their newsletter.

5. Look for your regional quilting organizations, where Guilds go to find teachers. This is not always easy as no two regions do things the same way. The following are a few relevant organization you can list with - and there is usually an annual fee to remain listed. 

• Northern California Quilt Council
• Southern California Council of Quilt Guilds
• Quilters Calendar
• Global Quilt Connection

 6. Paid advertising - this is always an option but think carefully before committing yourself. NEVER be tempted to "boost" a post on facebook or instagram. If you want to advertise with Meta use the proper ad platform. Do your research on where to advertise and how, how much you need to spend and how long your ad needs to run for before it will be effective. 

So that's it! I'd love to know if you decide to go ahead and teach and how you get on!

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